"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)

However, one that has been unjustly in prison since June 17, 1994 and remain there today is Rafael Ibarra Roque. He was arrested on that day and accused of sabotage without any evidence and on June 17, 1995 was condemned to 20 years in prison.

It was there that he came into contact with Cuban political prisoners and became aware of the gross and systematic injustices taking place in Cuba. Outside of prison he began to associate with former political prisoners and to learn about the real history of Cuba.

"His new position as head of the Party placed him under the scrutiny of the authorities, who quickly found a pretext for jailing him. They accused him of sabotage, which they were never able to prove, and of which he declared his innocence. Nonetheless, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1994. Apparently the sentencing of an innocent person is but a game or something similar to counting sheep before going to sleep."

Veteran Guizhou Activist Chen Xi Sentenced to Ten Years

On the morning of December 26, the Guiyang Municipal Intermediate People’s Court of Guizhou Province sentenced veteran dissident and human rights activist Chen Xi (陈西), to ten years prison and three years’ deprivation of political right for “inciting subversion of state power.” This heavy sentence follows the nine-year term imposed on Sichuan dissident Chen Wei (陈卫) three days ago. Chen Xi insists on his innocence but will not appeal.

Chen Xi’s wife, Zhang Qunxuan (张群选), told Human Rights in China, “The court hearing started at 9 a.m. and concluded by 12:30 p.m. The prosecution against Chen Xi was based upon his publication of 36 articles overseas. Chen Xi’s lawyers, Sun Guangquan (孙光全) and Bai Min (白敏), defended him on his not-guilty plea. In his self-defense in court, Chen Xi stated, ‘All the activities I have been engaged in are just and honorable, all in the open. Since I was released from prison on 2005, State Security has had communications with me on a weekly basis. They are aware of everything that I have been doing, and everything can be put on the table. So why had the law enforcement [authorities] not pointed out that I was committing a crime?’ When the presiding judge allowed Chen Xi to make his final statement, Chen Xi said, ‘I am a law-abiding person. I respect the court’s decision; I will not appeal.’”

Zhang added, “We made a final request to see Chen Xi, but the presiding judge denied the request. They are really heartless. The prosecution took his writings out of context. Actually, Chen Xi was calling for democracy and human rights. This wish was [his] whole crime!”

“The Chinese authorities’ ongoing tactic of imprisoning Chinese citizens will not address the deepening social conflicts in China. Instead, it will intensify them,” said Sharon Hom, Executive Director of Human Rights in China. “The march of heavy sentences imposed on democracy activists should be a wake-up call to the international community: China is at a critical crossroads and these activists need effective and immediate support.”

This is Chen Xi’s third prison sentence. During the period of the 1989 Democracy Movement, he was sentenced to three years for establishing the Patriotic and Democratic Federation. After his release, he continued to work for democracy and engage in human rights activities. He was sentenced to another ten years in March 1996 for organizing the Guizhou branch of the China Democracy Party, and pressing for redress for the 1989 crackdown. While in prison, he was beaten savagely and repeatedly by other prisoners reportedly instigated by the prison authorities.

After his release from prison in 2005, Chen Xi and other Guizhou activists established the First Guizhou Citizens International Human Rights Symposium that they subsequently convened on a yearly basis. On this foundation, they formed the Guizhou Human Rights Seminar, a weekly study and discussion session, to promote human rights. On the eve of International Human Rights Day this year, the local authorities banned the seminar as an illegal organization.

I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement

Twenty years have passed, but the ghosts of June Fourth have not yet been laid to rest. Upon release from Qincheng Prison in 1991, I, who had been led onto the path of political dissent by the psychological chains of June Fourth, lost the right to speak publicly in my own country and could only speak through the foreign media. Because of this, I was subjected to year‑round monitoring, kept under residential surveillance (May 1995 to January 1996) and sent to Reeducation‑Through‑Labor (October 1996 to October 1999). And now I have been once again shoved into the dock by the enemy mentality of the regime.

But I still want to say to this regime, which is depriving me of my freedom, that I stand by the convictions I expressed in my "June Second Hunger Strike Declaration" twenty years ago ‑ I have no enemies and no hatred. None of the police who monitored, arrested, and interrogated me, none of the prosecutors who indicted me, and none of the judges who judged me are my enemies. Although there is no way I can accept your monitoring, arrests, indictments, and verdicts, I respect your professions and your integrity, including those of the two prosecutors, Zhang Rongge and Pan Xueqing, who are now bringing charges against me on behalf of the prosecution.

[...]

Hatred can rot away at a person's intelligence and conscience. Enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation, incite cruel mortal struggles, destroy a society's tolerance and humanity, and hinder a nation's progress toward freedom and democracy. That is why I hope to be able to transcend my personal experiences as I look upon our nation's development and social change, to counter the regime's hostility with utmost goodwill, and to dispel hatred with love.

[...]

I hope that I will be the last victim of China's endless literary inquisitions and that from now on no one will be incriminated because of speech.

Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity, and the mother of truth. To strangle freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, stifle humanity, and suppress truth.

In order to exercise the right to freedom of speech conferred by the Constitution, one should fulfill the social responsibility of a Chinese citizen. There is nothing criminal in anything I have done. [But] if charges are brought against me because of this, I have no complaints.

Monday, December 26, 2011

Cuban author and intellectual Carlos Alberto Montaner described Vaclav Havel as the man who loved freedom and that is true but he also loved moral actions and justice. Havel recognized that “Man is not an omnipotent master of the universe, allowed to do with impunity whatever he thinks, or whatever suits him at the moment. The world we live in is made of an immensely complex and mysterious tissue about which we know very little and which we must treat with utmost humility.” It is that humility which Havel underlines that explains his belief that moral actions no matter how small do matter.

Havel believed that moral actions, no matter how small or futile they may appear at the time can have profound consequences for both freedom and a just society. It is because the world is not a puzzle to be solved but incredibly much more complex that decisions of right and wrong made by each person have such great importance.

Havel and Obama

Over 40 years later, when President Barack Obama backed out of meeting with the Dalai Lama due to an upcoming trip to China, Havel offered the corollary to the theorem expounded to Dubcek in 1968 at the October 12, 2009 of the Forum 2000 conference he had organized:

I believe that when the new Laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize postpones receiving the Dalai Lama until after he has accomplished his visit to China, he makes a small compromise, a compromise which actually has some logic to it. However, there arises a question as to whether those large, serious compromises do not have their origin and roots in precisely these tiny and very often more or less logical compromises.

“It is only a minor compromise,” Mr. Havel said of the nonreception of the Tibetan leader. “But exactly with these minor compromises start the big and dangerous ones, the real problems. “This is actually the first time I really do mind something Obama did,” Mr. Havel said. He minded it “much more” than Mr. Obama’s recent decision not to station elements of a missile-defense system in the Czech Republic, a move that several Central European politicians criticized but that Mr. Havel noted was ultimately “an internal American decision.”

In other words immoral actions no matter how small or "pragmatic" they appear at the time can also have profound consequences that can lead to an end of freedom and the rise of profound injustices.

The optimism expressed by Gorbachev and the nostalgia of Cohen fails to take into account the human cost of the USSR. The Soviet Union took the lives of an estimated 61 million human beings. It was a brutal and evil system that spawned other brutal regimes around the globe that claimed over a 100 million lives. Their lives mattered. Vaclav Havel in his 1990 New Years Speech called on his countrymen not to forget:

"The rivers of blood that have flowed in Hungary, Poland, Germany and recently in such a horrific manner in Romania, as well as the sea of blood shed by the nations of the Soviet Union, must not be forgotten. First of all because all human suffering concerns every other human being. But more than this, they must also not be forgotten because it is these great sacrifices that form the tragic background of today's freedom or the gradual emancipation of the nations of the Soviet Bloc, and thus the background of our own newfound freedom."

The numbers of lives lost is but the material accounting and does not take into account the spiritual ruin visited upon billions and its aftermath to the present day. The late Czech president explained it in the very same address:

"The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships."

The destruction both material and spiritual generated by the Soviet Union over seventy years will take centuries to repair and transcend. That hard truth may not be cause for celebration but the end of the system that wreaked so much damage is cause for celebration not regret. To do otherwise is to be heartless. The fact that it happened without violence on Christmas day in 1991 is also cause for joy.

Saturday, December 24, 2011

The Orlando Zapata Tamayo National Resistance Front and other dissident organizations have called on all Cubans in and out of the island to participate in a moment of prayer at 8 PM tonight, December 24th, Christmas Eve or “Nochebuena” as Cubans and other Hispanics refer to the day. According to the dissidents themselves, the prayers are for a free Cuba, and a better future where there are no political prisoners and excessive aggressions and divisions amongst the Cuban people. Among the many activists who have participated in this calling are Antunez, Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia, Luis Felipe Rojas, Caridad Caballero Batista, Idania Yanez Contreras, Raul Risco Perez, Berta Soler, Angel Moya and Librado Linares.

Every 24th of the month is the Day of the Resistance, where dissidents of diverse provinces and pro-democracy organizations participate in peaceful actions against the Castro tyranny and in demand of human rights for ALL Cubans. This date is usually marked by public protests, marches, or the handing out of pro-freedom pamphlets, but this time activists have opted for a moment of prayer, also because of the significance of the religious date.

Below is the audio of numerous opposition activists sharing their wishes for a future Cuba, as well as their reasons for calling on a moment of prayer. The audio is Spanish, there is no translation yet, but among the wishes are the freedom of all political prisoners, freedom for the activists Ivonne Malleza, Ignacio Martinez and Isabel Haydee (detained for 3 weeks now for saying the Cuban people are hungry), the end of family divisions, the end of the dictatorship, and many other thoughts of goodwill. There are hundreds of dissidents participating in this call, and only some appear here in this video:

Friday, December 23, 2011

"Raul Castro authorizes exits from small jails but still does not announce exits from the big jail." - Yoani Sanchez, on Raul Castro's announcement tonight

Expectations that the long hated travel restrictions placed on Cubans by the dictatorship would be lifted were heightened today. Deutsche Press-Agenturreported that"Rumours were rife Friday that Cuban President Raul Castro might lift travel restrictions and allow people to go in and out of the country more freely." Reuters reported that Cuba was "abuzz with speculation that President Raul Castro will soon announce policy changes making it easier for Cubans to travel abroad from their communist island." AFP journalist and photographer Alex Ogle tweeted at 7:30am EST today: "Keep eye out today for Cuba to lift a 50-year travel ban for its citizens > expected announcement will be historic."

However, of equally great importance are Havel's books Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karl Huizdala published in 1986 while still a dissident in Czechoslovakia, Summer Meditations published in 1993 following the "Velvet Divorce" when the country split nonviolently into the Czech and Slovak republics. Havel would later become the first president of the Czech Republic in January of 1993. Finally, To the Castle and Back published in 2008 offers a look back over the years of the Havel presidency.

When I talk about contaminated moral atmosphere … I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all — though naturally to differing extremes — responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery; none of us is just its victim: we are all also its co-creators.

All of these activists and many more are being imprisoned for exercising their freedom of expression and are prisoners of conscience. In addition, Chinese dissident Mao Hengfeng has suffered brutal beatings and torture for her human rights activism.

China: Harsh sentence for activist Chen Wei condemned

by Amnesty International

The nine-year jail sentence handed down to activist Chen Wei for writing critical articles about the Communist Party is unacceptable, Amnesty International said today, and urged Chinese authorities to release him immediately and unconditionally.

Chen Wei was sentenced for “inciting subversion of state power”. His lawyer, Zheng Jianwei, said the trial lasted less than two hours and added that his family said he would not appeal.

“Chen Wei is being punished for peacefully expressing his ideas,” said Catherine Baber, Deputy Asia-Pacific Director for Amnesty International.

“I wish we could say we were surprised by this sentence, but we have seen the Chinese government use this vague charge of “incitement” over and over to silence its critics and suppress discussion of human rights and political change,” she added.

According to the indictment, seen by Amnesty International, Chen Wei’s charge stems from essays he allegedly posted online and “sent to overseas organizations,” including New York-based human rights group, Human Rights in China.

“This is the toughest sentence given to anyone who was arrested and charged during the so-called Jasmine crackdown, when the government rounded up activists out of fear for potential demonstrations inspired by the Middle East and North Africa,” Catherine Baber said.

“We think the government is punishing Chen Wei for his many years of activism and trying to send a strong message to any would-be critics.”

Chen Wei, 42, was one of more than 130 activists detained after the U.S.-based news site, Boxun, reported an anonymous appeal for people to stage protests across China last February.

The online call to protest, inspired by the uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa and the “Jasmine Revolution” in Tunisia, led to one of the harshest crackdowns on dissent in China in recent years.

Government critics, bloggers, artists, “netizens” and other activists were detained, the vast majority of whom have been released without charges or on bail.

Authorities in Suining City, Sichuan Province, detained Chen Wei on 20 February and formally arrested him on 28 March. Since then, he has been held at the Suining City Detention Centre. His case was sent back twice to prosecutors because of a lack of evidence.

Zheng Jianwei said he was only able to meet with his client twice. Another lawyer reportedly met with Chen Wei once. The activist has only been allowed to communicate with his family in writing.

Chen Wei served as one of the leaders of the 1989 student democracy movement, for which he was imprisoned until January 1991. In May 1992, authorities arrested him again, this time for commemorating the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and for organizing a political party. They sentenced him to five years for “counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement.”

Chinese law does not define the meaning of “subversion,” nor does the law or related regulations or interpretations adequately define what it means to incite others to subvert state power.

Amnesty International is calling on the Chinese government to release other activists who have been held on the vague charge of "inciting subversion of state power," including:

"Netizen" Liang Haiyi, reportedly taken away by police on 19 February in the northern city of Harbin for sharing videos and information about the "Jasmine Revolution" on the Internet. Liang Haiyi, perhaps the first person to be arrested as part of the Jasmine crackdown, is reportedly being held on suspicion of "inciting subversion" and could be tried at any time.

Veteran activist Chen Youcai, also known as Chen Xi, who was detained 29 November for being a member of the Guizhou Human Rights Forum, which authorities declared was an illegal organization. Chen Xi could stand trial at any time and, like Chen Wei, could face a harsh sentence due to his long work as a rights advocate.

Human rights lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, who was sent back to prison last week after “violating” his probation, according to reports in China’s state media. Authorities charged him with “inciting subversion” in December 2006 and sentenced him to a three–year suspended prison sentence. He was initially held under house arrest and then subjected to enforced disappearance repeatedly over nearly three years.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Liu Xiaobo, who was awarded the prize in absentia on 10 December 2010. Liu Xiaobo was sentenced in 2009 to 11 years in prison for his role in drafting Charter 08, and other writings which called for democratic reforms. His wife, artist Liu Xia, is under illegal house arrest. She has not been charged with any crime and Amnesty International has called for authorities to immediately restore her freedom.

Sichuan-based activist Liu Xianbin, who was sentenced in March to 10 years in prison for his role in promoting democratic reform, including his support of the Charter 08 petition movement.

Beijing-based activist Hu Jia, who was released from prison in June after serving three and a half years for "inciting subversion" but now lives in conditions equivalent to house arrest along with his wife, Zeng Jinyan, and young daughter.

Liu Xiaobo was convicted of "inciting subversion of state power" but it is important to highlight what this Orwellian phrase seeks to obfuscate that the Chinese dissident was imprisoned for his role in drafting and circulating an open letter requesting reforms. A group of 303 Chinese writers, intellectuals, lawyers, journalists, retired Party officials, workers, peasants, and businessmen issued this open letter - "Charter 08" - on December 9, 2008 calling for legal reforms, democracy and protection of human rights in China. This is the reason Liu Xiaobo was placed on trial and condemned to 11 years in prison.

The similarities, I would say, are in the basic structure of human rights reflected in a democratic system, which of course the regime doesn’t want. The regime wishes for the dictatorship of one party. I think this is where Charter 08and Charter 77 are similar: they have similar targets and similar messages to deliver to the [respective] regimes.

I have urgent request to make to you today. As you know, Vaclav Havel nominated the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo for the Nobel Peace Prize 2010.[...]I, too, believe that Liu Xiaobo deserves the Nobel Peace Prize because in the face of countless threats from the Chinese regime and great risk to his life, he has fought unerringly for the freedom of the individual.

I hope that I will be the last victim of China's endless literary inquisitions and that from now on no one will be incriminated because of speech.

Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity, and the mother of truth. To strangle freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, stifle humanity, and suppress truth.

In order to exercise the right to freedom of speech conferred by the Constitution, one should fulfill the social responsibility of a Chinese citizen. There is nothing criminal in anything I have done. [But] if charges are brought against me because of this, I have no complaints.

"For more than a decade, from autumn 1992, when Václav Havel was deciding whether to run for the post of Czech president, to January 2003, when he left Prague Castle for the last time, director Pavel Koutecký followed the president everywhere he went. He shot hours and hours of footage, footage that reveals everything from picking his way through Machiavellian post-election negotiations to giving restaurant tips to the Rolling Stones."

"The world has lost an amazing human rights leader. Vaclav Havel embodied the spirit of thousands of brave human rights defenders, who challenge oppression and the denial of human dignity. He did so by combining humor and a steadfast determination to fight for fundamental rights no matter the cost to his personal well-being. The pressure he brought on his government while a prisoner of conscience and the spotlight he shone on repression helped bring human rights to millions of people. When he later led the government, he worked diligently to ensure that the rights of freedom of expression and opinion were respected and protected and that the people he governed would not, again, be imprisoned for exercising their basic human rights. We thank Havel, once again, for his courage and leadership as we bid him farewell."

Porno para Ricardo is a punk rock band that has been censored and prohibited from playing in public. It appears that drawing inspiration from The Beatles who on January 30, 1969 held their last public performance on the rooftop of their building at Apple Records. It was unannounced and ended with the London police shutting them down because the concert had left to traffic stoppages because drivers and pedestrians stopped commuting to watch the concert. The Beatles strategically and secretly placed recording cameras to document the entire affair.

It appears that Porno para Ricardo did the same thing. The only difference being that it was done on an open balcony and not the roof top. The lead singer of the band, Gorki Aguila announces into the camera because they were not allowed to play concerts in public on International Human Rights Day (December 10) that they were going to play at their studio "La Paja Recold." Their are cameras outside on the ground and on the balcony itself recording the happening.

The difference between the roof top live concerts by The Beatles/U2 and Porno para Ricardo is that in Cuba the police didn't even bother to show up and tell the band to stop the public disruption. In communist Cuba the state security agents just shut off electricity to the entire building.

Mr. President, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, and to all those citizens of Cuba who are listening to us:

I am here in Florida for the first time in my life, and Florida is also the last state in the United States - and the last place on the whole American continent - that I will be visiting as President of my country. It was my own choice to come to Florida, and I have chosen it, among other things, because it is from here that I want to extend my greetings to all Cubans - both to those who live here, and to those who live at home, in Cuba.

Every modern, freedom-loving person feels, or at least ought to feel, a sense of solidarity both with those who are prevented from living in their home country or from freely visiting it, and with those who are forced to live in their country in a state of constant fear, and who cannot leave it and return to it of their own free will.

Václav Havel speaks about the Cuban regime in 2007

But there are people who should naturally feel this kind of solidarity far more intensively than others. I am referring to those of us who experienced first hand, on our own skins, as it were, the oppressive weight of life under a totalitarian system of the communist type, or who may even have tried to resist that system and, in doing so, experienced just how important the solidarity and help offered by people from freer countries was.

I think that one of the most diabolical instruments for subjugating some people and fooling others is the special Communist language. It is a language full of subterfuge, ideological jargon, meaningless phrases and stereotypical figures of speech. To people who have not seen through its mendacity or who have never had to live in a world manipulated by it, this language can appear very attractive. At the same time, in others, this very same language can evoke fear and horror and force them into permanent state of dissimulation.

In my country, too, entire generations of people once let themselves be led astray by this kind of language with its fine words about justice, peace and the necessity of fighting against those who, allegedly in the interests of evil foreign powers, resisted the power that spoke this language. The great advantage of this language lies in the fact that all its parts are firmly bound together in a closed system of dogmas that excludes anything that does not fit.

Any idea with a hint of originality or independence - as well as any word that is not part of the official vocabulary - is labeled an ideological diversion - almost, it would seem, before anyone can express it. The web of dogmas deployed to justify any arbitrary action by the ruling power, therefore, usually takes a utopian form - that is, an artificial construct that contains a whole set of reasons why everything that does not fit the structure or that reaches beyond it must be suppressed, forbidden or destroyed for the sake of some happy future.

The easy thing to do is to accept this language, to believe in it or, at least, to adapt to it. It is very difficult to maintain one’s own point of view, though common sense may tell you a hundred times over that you are right, as long as that means either revolting against the language of the powers-that-be, or simply refusing to use it.

A system of persecutions, of bans, of informers, of compulsory elections, of spying on one’s neighbors, of censorship and, ultimately, of concentration camps is hidden behind a veil of beautiful words that have utterly no shame in calling enslavement a “higher form of freedom,” of calling independent thinking a way of “supporting imperialism,” or labeling the entrepreneurial spirit a way of “impoverishing one’s fellow humans” and calling human rights a “bourgeois fiction.”

My country’s experience was simple: when the internal crisis of the totalitarian system grows so deep that it becomes clear to everyone, and when an more and more people learn to speak their own language and reject the hollow, mendacious language of the powers that be, it means that freedom is remarkably close, if not directly within reach. All of a sudden, it seems that the king is naked and the mysterious radiant energy that comes from free speech and free actions turns out to be more powerful than the strongest army, police force, or party organization, stronger than the greatest power of a centrally directed and centrally devastated economy, or of the centrally controlled and centrally enslaved media, those chief propagators of the mendacious language of the official utopia.

Our world, as a whole, is not in the best of shape and the direction it is headed in may well be quite ambivalent. But this does not mean that we are permitted to give up on free and cultivated thinking and to replace it with a set of utopian clichés. That would not make the world a better place, it would only make it worse. On the contrary, it means that we must do more for our own freedom, and that of others.

May all Cubans live in freedom and enjoy independence and prosperity! To all those who have not lost the will to resist arbitrary force and lies, may your dreams be fulfilled! And may Oswaldo Payá Sardinas, the great champion of human rights in Cuba, be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and may this award strengthen the courage of all the Cuban people to take up non-violent resistance against an oppressive regime!

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Over twitter on Sunday Cuban dissidents expressed their condolences, prayers and mourning for Vaclav Havel. At the same time many recognized the solidarity he had demonstrated on their behalf over the years. The English translation is on top and the original Spanish in bold just below.

I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions. - Vaclav Havel, Speech of October 1989, accepting a peace prize

Lord Actonin a letter to Bishop Mandell Creightondated April 5, 1887 stated: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority." It is precisely because of men like Václav Havel that Acton must insert the world "almost."

I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.

Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nations is not being used sensibly. Entire branches of industry are producing goods that are of no interest to anyone, while we are lacking the things we need. A state which calls itself a workers' state humiliates and exploits workers. Our obsolete economy is wasting the little energy we have available. A country that once could be proud of the educational level of its citizens spends so little on education that it ranks today as seventy-second in the world. We have polluted the soil, rivers and forests bequeathed to us by our ancestors, and we have today the most contaminated environment in Europe. Adults in our country die earlier than in most other European countries.

Living in truth as both a dissident and later as a head of state while defending and embracing human rights no matter how remote the chances for success are the reasons why many are celebrating the life of Václav Havel.

In August of 1969 in a letter to the recently overthrown Czechoslovak Communist Party chairman Alexander Dubček following the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks he wrote: "Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance."

“I am one of Mahatma Gandhi's admirers, and, if I may be so bold, I believe that a reflection of his life's work might even be seen in the attempt my friends and I made, in Charter 77, to create a nonviolent opposition to the totalitarian regime in our country. This aspect of our activity later had a positive influence on the course of our anti-totalitarian revolution in 1989.”

Hopefully the outpouring of love and affection for Václav Havel will inspire other politicians to follow his example and join that small pantheon of great and good men who have also been statesmen.

Every year at the Forum 2000 that he organized in which world leaders, philosophers and artists participated (where there was always a place for dissidents and recently exiled prisoners of conscience to take part) in a conversation on the pressing issues of the day and to seek solutions. Today on their website Forum 2000 issued the following statement regarding the passing of Václav Havel:

Today, December 18, 2011, Václav Havel, the founder of the Forum 2000 Foundation and former President of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, has passed away. President Havel was a lifelong fighter for freedom and human dignity and a deeply thoughtful person, troubled by the indifference of our civilization to its own future. The idea for the Forum 2000 Conference originated in 1997, when, together with the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel, and philanthropist Yohei Sasakawa, he invited world leaders to Prague to discuss the challenges humanity was facing on the threshold of a new millennium. Since then, Forum 2000 conferences continue to address topics ranging from the state of democracy and human rights to interfaith dialogue, environmental sustainability of the economic growth, the importance of the rule of law, or the role of media.

Václav Havel´s legacy will be the emphasis on the importance of freedom and democracy for a successful development of the society, insistence on the universality of human rights, or the indispensability of moral basis for all kinds of human endeavor. We will always remember Václav Havel for the courage and modesty with which he defended these principles.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama tweeted about his old friend who had just passed: "The best tribute to honor and remember Václav Havel is to work as best we can towards building a more peaceful, open and just world."

Requiescat in pace Václav Havel, great defender and friend of freedom. A great and good man.